Putting Money on the Screen

Jeff Tunnell is an awesome producer (among his other talents), and I’ve learned a lot from working with him. One of his frequent words of guidance while wearing his producer hat? “Put the money on the screen.”

There are a lot of ways to prioritize building software. What feature/change do you tackle first? Depending on the phase of the project you might want to focus on…

Vertical slice order. Get full functionality going in a small area first. In games this is usually one complete and playable level. In apps it might be the central interaction, like making a purchase or accessing a service. In websites it might be one complete page out of the entire site. Programmers like to think of this as depth-first traversal.

Horizontal slice order. Focus on roughing out broad areas before getting into the details. When I do this, my project usually ends up with a bunch of brightly colored screens with words like “STORE” and “MAIN MENU” and “WORLD MAP” on them. They don’t do much but you can quickly experience the flow of the app and adjust. In programmer land, this is a breadth first traversal.

Severity order. Also known as “QA driven development” – you ship builds off to be tested, get bugs ranked by severity, and tackle the most serious first. You end up with stable software, but functionality, usability, and polish can suffer depending on the criteria of evaluation. It’s also hard to really change the overall feel of the project when working in this mode.

Money on the Screen order. Maximize bang for buck. In other words, look for features that require small amounts of developer time but move the perceived value/quality of the project ahead substantially. The converse is also valuable – look for things that detract from perceived quality that are also easy to fix.

At different times, these are all valid paths. Early on, to flesh out your project, you probably want to do a horizontal or vertical slice. To ship a stable release, you might need to strictly follow severity order. Everything is contextual.

The magic of “money on the screen” is that it gets you thinking about your project from a fresh angle. What is the smallest change I can make to improve this product the most? It’s not the same as polish – you can have a very polished interaction that’s actively bad! Sometimes it’s the last little step to show off a ton of behind the scenes hard work.

Here’s an example. When I was working on Grunts: Skirmish, a tower defense game I built at PushButton Labs, I did a ton of work on the unit behavior. Each on screen character ran a finite state machine driven by complex AI routines. An animation engine sequenced hundreds of pre-rendered 3D sprites. A data-driven component system tracked weapon status, health status, and updated the navmap. But despite all that the gameplay felt flat until I added little numbers that floated up when characters were damaged, healed, or upgraded. All of a sudden the complex behaviors behind the scenes were more visible to the users and it felt GOOD! Money on the screen!

Another example is Marble Blast Ultra, an XBox 360 launch title I helped build at GarageGames. We had a great (and for the time cutting edge) shader system but until very late in the project, our marbles were pretty lackluster in appearance. Similarly, we struggled with repetitive looking tiles on level geometry. Not good for the central element of the game! Small amounts of work enhancing the shaders in both cases dramatically improved the look of the game and really leveraged our investment in a new rendering architecture. Money on the screen!

A non-game example is the documentation for the Loom SDK. Actually writing the documentation and auto-generation scripts for the docs was a ton of work. But even with all that work, it wasn’t very useful. It was cumbersome to find the right page in the docs and generally the hard work we put in was wasted. Then we realized that the best way to get money on the screen was by adding a quick search box. Users could quickly see their available options, choose them, or even just try typing terms in to find a match. It only took a day or two of work and made the docs dramatically more useful. Money on the screen!

Every project is an investment, if only in time. Don’t you owe it to yourself to maximize your return? Too many times I’ve seen amazing systems that never put their full value front and center. From time to time, take a step back, look at what you’re doing and ask yourself – “How can I put money on the screen?” More often than you’d think, a small change can have a huge pay off.

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